Lib at Large: Branson teacher's ordeal in the Indian sex trade

NATASHA SINGH, an English teacher at the exclusive Branson School in Ross, decided to spend her summer vacation doing research — in the brothels and red light districts of India.

Emotionally devastated by the fatal gang rape of a young woman on a bus in New Delhi last year, a crime that outraged people around the world, she went to India to gain a better understanding of a culture in which women feel unsafe in public places despite the heightened awareness of sexual violence in the aftermath of the horrific attack.

"I wanted to go to India and get beneath that subject, to understand it fully," Singh explained one recent afternoon during a break from classes. "I wanted to introduce a course on gender violence at Branson, and I went to India in order to talk to the women who are on the front lines, women who are facing violence themselves. I was particularly interested in gender violence as it manifests itself in human trafficking, so I was doing that in order to bring some of these voices into the classroom."

In India, "rape has been a largely invisible crime, where convictions are infrequent and victims silently go away," according to a New York Times story on a trial of five men accused of repeatedly raping a 22-year-old photojournalist in Mumbai earlier this year.

The website Safeworldforwomen.org cites the alarming statistic that one-third of Indian women will be either raped or sexually assaulted in their lifetimes.

Dark-haired and attractive, the 40-year-old Singh is a Canadian citizen living in Oakland. She has a B.A. from the University of Toronto in women's studies and history and a master's of fine arts from Sarah Lawrence College in fiction writing. Of Indian heritage, she has family in India and has visited there many times in the past, but never to look into the dark corners of the Indian sex trade.

"I ended up moving into a brothel lane in a red light area of Calcutta," she told me. "I conducted a lot of interviews. I thought it would be best to get a sense of the community from within instead of being someone who comes in and just leaves."

With the help of a friend, a woman activist who runs a non-governmental organization that tries to rescue and rehabilitate women forced into prostitution, Singh traveled across India, interviewing women who had been trafficked in Mumbai, Pune, Calcutta and Siliguri, a city of more than 10 million in Northeast India.

"It wasn't until I got to North Bengal that I got myself in trouble," she said, explaining that while there, she'd heard about a 13-year-old girl from a middle class family who had been raped in a hotel room after being lured there by a trusted woman neighbor, "an auntie figure."

"The two men who raped her said they would put footage of the assault on the Internet if she said anything," Singh said.

Perhaps not coincidentally, that is the same tactic the five accused rapists in Mumbai used to silence their rape victims, according to police.

"The girl was very frightened," Singh continued. "For two years she was forced into prostituting herself. Among her clients were some of the highest-ranking government and police officials in that area. And as soon as I touched on that, I was picked up by intelligence officers and interrogated."

After demanding her passport, the officers put her in the back of their car and drove her around in the dark. "Their whole pretext was, 'Oh, we want to help you,'" she recalled. "They knew I was asking questions."

She had also heard horror stories about what had happened to other women who dared accuse the police of criminal activity.

"You can be drugged, raped, locked up and forced to service people and be broken that way, both physically, mentally spiritually," she said. "I was terrified, afraid for my own safety."

Eventually, they let her go, but her ordeal wasn't over. Darjeeling police subsequently deported her, serving her with a "Quit India" order. Reluctantly, angrily, she went back to Delhi and boarded a flight for home.

"If that wasn't shocking enough, when I got back to California, I went online and found out that police had connected me to Pakistani intelligence, which is tantamount to terrorism in the Indian press," she said. "I was just reeling."

A story in the Kalimpong News linked her to Inter-Services Intelligence, commonly known in India as ISI, the premiere intelligence agency of the rival Pakistani government, their equivalent of our CIA. The Kalimpong News article, which quoted only the Darjeeling police, was illustrated by a photo of an unidentified person in handcuffs.

It accused Singh of paying a jailhouse visit to Mesho Souria, one of five ISI agents arrested by Darjeeling police in May.

"Singh violated her visa conditions on two counts," Darjeeling Superintendent of Police Kunal Agarwal was quoted as saying. "Firstly, a tourist visa does not permit foreigners to work in India. She was working with an NGO (non-governmental organization). Secondly, she visited a high-profile accused (suspect) in jail."

According to Darjeeling police, Souria is suspected of supplying sensitive information to Nepal-based ISI agents for three years.

Singh said she was staying with Souria's sister, who ran one of the rescue organizations, and admitted accompanying her to the jail for "emotional support."

"But I don't know this guy from Adam," she insisted. "The police found this bit out and made it seem like I was connected to a terrorist or murderer. They spun this detail into this story to obscure the fact that they're involved in this other case. They said I violated my visa. All of it was ridiculous and untrue."

Singh said she spent the rest of the summer trying to clear her name in the Indian press. The Times of India published her side of the story, allowing her to detail her ordeal at the hands of the police.

"Men came that night aiming flashlights at my window," she said in a July 23 article. "I was detained, my passport was confiscated. I was not given food to eat — except for a pack of chips — and not permitted to use the bathroom without a guard. I was deported from India under duress and threat of further detention. I was told by an intelligence agent that bad things would happen to me if I didn't leave the country."

She also denied police allegations that she gave them false identification.

"The only identification I presented to them was my valid Canadian passport, which they copied," she said. "Even though the police knew I am Canadian, they informed the media that I am a U.S. citizen."

Singh is now back at Branson, teaching and volunteering as the faculty adviser for a weekly discussion group of students interested in gender violence and political activism.

"It's taken me a few months to reinhabit my own body and get used to doing my own work and getting back into my life," she said. "I know I'm forever changed."

A two-time recipient of the prestigious Canada Council Grant for Writers, she's begun writing a book about what happened to her in India, and stays in touch via Skype with the activists she worked with there.

"If someone like me who's just a high school teacher from California can get ousted based on a lie, and these guys can keep doing what they do with impunity, you have to wonder what happens to the average person," she said. "One of the gifts about being a teacher and a writer is that I know I can do something about it."